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Website Conversion Marketing Tips

Website conversion marketing is all about converting web visitors into customers.

Attracting visitors to visit your site is just one step. You’ll also want to know the conversion rate — the percentage of visitors turning to paying customers.

And if you find out your rate is lower than the industry standard, you would want to optimize the conversion process.

There are conversion rate optimization tools that help track reasons potential customers left your site without buying.

The tools let you analyze at which conversion step they stop and quit. You can check your assumptions on their objections through testing different variations. And the results can offer you solid ideas for improving your conversion rate.

That is a brief intro of website conversion marketing. Before we go into the detail steps of fixing a low conversion rate let’s talk about the basics first.

What Is Website Conversion Rate?

Website conversion rate measures the effectiveness of a website in achieving its goal.

Some examples of goals are a sign up for email newsletter, a whitepaper download, a product purchase, or any other desired responses. If you know your website goal(s) clearly you can select the right conversion rate measurement for the goal(s).

If the goal is to get new newsletter subscribers then your conversion rate should be the percentage of visitors who sign up to your email newsletter to total visitors.

For an e-commerce website with the goal of selling products, however, the conversion rate is the ratio of visitors who buy a product to total visitors.

Website Conversion Rate Benchmark

Once you know what you are measuring, get a conversion rate benchmark. Using the MarketingSherpa 2012 Website Optimization Benchmark Report, look at the average conversion rate of your industry.

If you have any historical data you can use the benchmark for setting up your new conversion rate goal. If not, just use it for developing your website conversion rate goal.

Website Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversation rate optimization (CRO) is the act of improving a website effectiveness in achieving its goal.

A website aiming to generate email leads should convince visitors to hand over their email address. For an e-commerce site this will mean displaying elements that create trust so visitors believe their personal information is safe with the company.

Conversion rate experts have developed many strategies for optimizing conversion rates.

There are many conversion tools that are available for you to test effectiveness of different designs. If you don’t want to do it yourself there are optimization experts who can help dissect detailed statistics and tweak landing pages for you.

Complexity and scale of conversion rate optimizations can vary widely. It may just test different layout variations that might improve conversion rate. For a bigger project, however, it can start from target audience analysis to totally new web design and development.

6 Steps To Increase Your Website Conversion Rate

Improving site conversion rate is the key to a successful online business.

Continuously optimizing conversion to make it better than the competitors are a never-ending effort. This involves boosting customer confidence through testing different design elements and content on important landing pages. Here are the 6 steps:

1. Start with Google Analytics.

Make sure you set up goal(s) for your website. This can be “order confirmation” or “thank you for registering” or any others. You can learn how to set goals and funnels for tracking abandoned web pages from the video down below.

2. Install another analytics.

Crazy Egg and Click Tale are an example of analytics that visually shows what a visitor is doing on your website with heatmaps.

While Crazy Egg shows heatmaps of areas where visitors want more information Click Tale records videos on forms that cause visitors to abandon that web page.

3. Deepen the acquired data through customer surveys.

This is especially helpful if you run an e-commerce website that experiences a high rate of shopping cart abandonment. Customer survey results let you know reasons prospects left your online store without spending any money.

4. Once you have collected the data, list all issues.

Get a spreadsheet to sort them up starting from the ones that come up most often and use it for coming up with possible solutions. For example, if visitors abandon your website’s sign up form you can redirect them back to the page on their next visit.

5. Prioritize the possible solutions and create the variations for testing.

Don’t forget to track the testing with your analytics and always keep records of everything. Set up a website optimization test at Crazy Egg to get a heatmap for the new page.

Keep records of what works and what doesn’t. Evaluate whether you want to go further with the same test. Or alternatively, learn whether you can apply what works elsewhere.

Review Your Website Conversion Funnel

Now it’s time review your conversion funnel. These are steps or processes beginning from a visitor coming to a page on your website to taking your desired action.

You can set up your funnels using your Google Analytics account. The tool allows you to visually learn how your visitors go through each step of your conversion path and then isolate problems at any point for making further conversion optimization.

When the review shows you many steps that cause visitor confusions, you may want to check your overall website design.